We want students to be able to answer high level questions, but we also want them to ﻿create﻿ these types of questions. If your students need a little help doing this, try using a Create A Question bag.

I developed question stemsfrom the top three levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. These are generic enough that they can be used with almost any content. Then I cut them up and placed some into each of several bags. Each team was given a bag and every student was to reach in and select a question. They had a few minutes to generate a question based on our lesson, write it down on a blank strip of paper and place it into the teacher's bag.

Original Stem

What type of people would be on your team to solve...becameWhat type of people would be on your team to solve the energy crisis?

We then randomly chose student questions to read aloud and answer. Students were highly engaged and excited to answer their peers' questions. Simple and reusable!

Here's a simple challenge that can lead students to read their texts very closely. After providing your students with the assigned reading material, pass out sticky notes. Tell them that their challenge is to write a question about the topic that is NOT answered by the text. This causes them to read, and reread, and maybe reread again to make sure that the answer isn't in the text. Not only does this lead to interesting questions, but the repeated readings with a purpose lead to improved comprehension and retention. This photo represents all the questions students generated about the 3 branches of government. Before adding a question to the chart, they had to be sure that the text did not already answer it. Tomorrow we will explore finding answers to some of these thoughtful questions!